Caribbean & Diaspora Storytelling
Nikki Woods
Author · Publisher · Radio Producer
Nikki Woods spent nearly two decades in radio, the longest stretch of it as executive producer of The Tom Joyner Morning Show, a program broadcast daily to roughly eight million listeners across more than 115 markets. She now runs Maroon House Press, an independent publisher of Caribbean and diaspora storytelling.
The two are the same work by different means. Radio taught her whose stories get airtime and whose do not. The press exists because the same question applies to books — she has written about that throughline here.
She writes Jamaican folklore-driven fiction and nonfiction on over-functioning and recovery. She spends time between Dallas, Chicago, and St. Ann, Jamaica. Her family roots run through Swift River, Portland Parish.
Radio
She joined The Tom Joyner Morning Show in 2008 and rose to executive producer, working behind the scenes on a nationally syndicated program that combined entertainment with philanthropy in support of Black culture, health, and education. Joyner — himself known as the hardest working man in radio — called her the hardest working senior producer in it.
Before that she spent ten years at WGCI in Chicago, co-hosting the Crazy Howard McGee morning show and producing news and traffic, until the station replaced its local morning show with national syndication. Her first radio job was at WILD in Boston, as co-host and news director.
She had not planned on radio. She studied education at Howard University and taught — in Missouri, and in Jamaica — before concluding it wasn’t the work she was meant for. She went back to school at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois, and took a journalism degree in 1995. The year in Jamaica turned out to matter more than the teaching did.
Her radio career is also covered on Wikipedia.
Nikki Woods Media
Alongside the show she built her own company, Nikki Woods Media, training individuals and corporations in personal branding, message delivery and platform development, through one-on-one coaching and speaking engagements. The work earned her a reputation as a global visibility expert and produced two books on building an audience online.
She has served as an ambassador for Pretty Brown Girls, and was named ME&WE Inc Woman of the Year in 2013.
Maroon House Press
She founded Maroon House Press to publish Caribbean and diaspora storytelling on its own terms — named for the escaped, the resistant, and the self-determined. The catalog runs from literary fiction to crime to nonfiction, and she writes across several pen names within it. One of them is not invented: Lorna Phillips is her Jamaican birth name, and it carries the Jamaica-rooted literary fiction — Swift River: The Water That Remembers and Provision Ground: The Land They Could Not Prove. She also writes The Gospel According to Silence as L.J. Porter — the full author roster is here. Why the Jamaica novels are not under her own name. Under her own name she also co-wrote Tolipothy: The Root Awakens, a literary fantasy, with Christian Ruff.
Her own fiction returns to the folklore and family memory of Swift River, a market village in Portland Parish that floods emptied between 1932 and 1943. Her great-grandmother was born there in 1881. That research runs in public on this site — the history of the village, how to trace a Jamaican line, why so many Jamaicans carry Scottish surnames — including the parts that do not resolve.
The Reinvention Method
Her nonfiction comes from the same place by a different road: what it costs to be the one everybody leans on. The Reinvention Method is a leadership framework for high-achieving Black women navigating career pivots, heightened visibility and expanding responsibility — without burning themselves down to prove they deserve the room.
Underneath it sits Nervous System Capitalism™, her name for how professional systems extract emotional and physiological labor from high performers, and particularly from Black women. In 2026 she took that work to the AEMS summer school on alternative economic and monetary systems in Vienna, and wrote about it in What Vienna Taught Me About Money, Land, and the Cost of Growth. The argument is that capacity, clarity and agency are leadership strengths, and that success models built on overextension and self-erasure are not.
The Strong One speaks directly to the women carrying everything, and to the cost of it.
In November 2026 Nikki spoke to Voyage Dallas about radio, reinvention and building the press; read our guide to the Voyage Dallas interview.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Nikki Woods?
An American radio producer, author and publisher. She was executive producer of the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner Morning Show and founded Maroon House Press, an independent publisher of Caribbean and diaspora storytelling. She also publishes Jamaica-rooted literary fiction under her Jamaican birth name, Lorna Phillips. How one became the other is here.
What show did Nikki Woods produce?
The Tom Joyner Morning Show, which she joined in 2008. Before that she spent ten years at WGCI in Chicago and began her radio career at WILD in Boston.
What books has Nikki Woods written?
Fiction including The Drowning of Maya Sinclair, Easier Said Than Done, and Tolipothy: The Root Awakens, a literary fantasy written with Christian Ruff, and nonfiction including The Strong One, The Stillness Practice, and the Shift series. As Lorna Phillips, her Jamaican birth name, she wrote Swift River: The Water That Remembers and Provision Ground: The Land They Could Not Prove. She also writes under several other pen names.
What is Nervous System Capitalism™?
Her term for how professional systems extract emotional and physiological labor from high performers, particularly Black women. It underpins The Reinvention Method and The Strong One.
What is Maroon House Press?
An independent press she founded to publish Caribbean and diaspora storytelling, named for the escaped, the resistant, and the self-determined. The full author roster is here.
Where should I start?
For fiction, The Drowning of Maya Sinclair. For nonfiction, The Strong One. For the Jamaica research, Read the Names, which is free.
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